The Best TV of 2012

“The fact that television exists in so remote a land,” the restless travel writer Tim Cahill wrote of Hiva Oa in the Marquesas Islands, in his travel story Visions of Terror and Paradise, “in a place littered with the artifacts of the old times and the old beliefs, sometimes staggers the imagination and presents the traveller with a number of truly remarkable cultural cross-currents.”

And to think that those gentle, kind residents of a small band of islands in the equatorial Pacific haven’t been exposed yet to the pleasures of The Real Housewives of Vancouver or The Bachelor Canada.

Television produces a lot of trash in any given year. We know this. One might say TV does little more than contribute to the already vast 251 million tons of garbage being produced each year in the U.S. alone — this, according to a Planet Green post the Discovery Channel website.

And yet …

When debating what 10 shows to put on the list of The Best TV of 2012, I lost track of time. This is a golden age of drama. Provided you subscribe to cable, and aren’t forced to choose between CSI: New York, Bones, Criminal Minds, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit or The Mob Doctor.

The year’s finest dramas — and there are a considerable number of them — can be found on the specialty-channel band, from HBO, FX and AMC to The Movie Network, Showcase and Super Channel. They are not, however, to be found on the major, mainstream broadcast networks.

The broadcast networks prefer reality TV over chancy, risk-taking drama, because it’s cheap to produce and easy to do. True, some competition programs are better than others. The Voice, The Amazing Race, So You Think You Can Dance, Survivor and a handful of others continue to engage and entertain, even after all these years. They don’t hold up to long-term scrutiny, though, not in the same way Mad Men, Breaking Bad and Homeland will, five, 10 or even 25 years from now.

Many will disagree with my choices. That’s the idea. Year-end lists are always a conversation starter.

There was a lot of remarkable television over the last year, and don’t let anyone tell you differently, whether they’re from Hiva Oa or Halifax.

Here are a few programs worthy of mention. As we’ve already seen, there were many others — almost too many to name here.

10. The Killing (AMC) The bleakness was still there, the long hushes in the rain, the unnerving emotional landscape of a family’s struggling with the loss a loved one. When The Killing returned from its self-imposed exile in the wilderness — that ending! how could they?! — there was a renewed energy, and a renewed focus on the need for answers. When those answers came, it was bound to be a letdown. A broken tail light? Really? When the rain finally settled, though, what we were left with was something remarkable: A TV murder mystery that made us care about the victim for once, in a way those who watched The Killing from the outset won’t soon forget.

Don’t believe the reports, by the way, that The Killing has been cancelled. As of writing, there were signs that AMC may be close to a 12th-hour deal with the online streaming service Netflix that will see the Nordic-styled filmed-in-Vancouver thriller back for a third season.

9. Boardwalk Empire (HBO) Boardwalk Empire’s third season might have been maddening for some — too many characters! too much story! too many notes! Despite the occasional explicit and terrifying moments of violence, there was a renewed focus on family this season. And regret. Regret by Steve Buscemi’s Prohibition-era bootlegger Nucky Thompson, not so much for his lost empire, but over his failing marriage. And regret for the past — doubly ironic in a period gangster drama that, after all, is set in the past.

8. Game of Thrones (HBO) Failing marriage was a recurring theme in many of the year’s finest TV dramas. No marriage was as doomed to fail as the adolescent shackling of a naive, silly Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner) and the malevolent, psychotic Boy King Joffrey Baratheon (Jack Gleeson), in Game of Thrones’ second season. The attention to magical, fantastical detail — dragons! castles! warlocks! — in Game of Thrones is breathtaking to behold. It’s the vital human emotions, though, and the unbearable tension of a child plotting to kill another child, that make Game of Thrones one of primetime television’s most gripping, addictive thrillers. Game of Thrones isn’t just for fanboys, or fangirls. It’s a singular and monumental achievement, a complex, adult, emotionally rich fantasy writ large across the small screen.

7. Boss (Starz, Super Channel) Boss’ second season was, if anything, even more intricately plotted and unnerving than the first, as Kelsey Grammer’s scheming Chicago Mayor Tom Kane consolidated power, even as forces gathered in the darkness around him. By the season’s end, it was clear that Kane’s ham-handed efforts to repair bridges and mend relationships with his family were just a sham, a bid to buy himself a little extra time before his enemies did him. Perhaps no television drama has been more adept at making a dreary, seemingly meaningless city council meeting look like a matter of life and death.

6. The Walking Dead (AMC) “The Walking Dead strips away civilization, and see what imprint it has left on the minds and souls of the survivors.” No, that wasn’t some fanboy talking at Comic-Con, but rather conservative blogger and social critic Andrew Sullivan, tweeting just days before The Walking Dead’s midseason finale earlier this month. But wait, there was more. “The elementary struggle for survival in the zombie apocalypse isn’t a struggle against evil; it’s a struggle against an amoral horror.” Them’s mighty fine words for what was assumed to be a silly TV zombie thriller, George Romero dumbed down for the small screen. Instead, The Walking Dead has become one of TV’s most trenchant and poignant commentaries on what it means to be human. A mother, one of the story’s lead characters from the beginning, died while giving birth to a child. A good Samaritan who’d done no one harm had his leg amputated to save his life. And a pair of innocents, finding love for the first time, found themselves kidnapped and chained into the middle of a terrible ordeal. TV is so often about dashed expectations. The Walking Dead has done the exact opposite. It’s taken a low bar and raised it sky high.

5. The Colbert Report (Comedy Central, CTV) The Daily Show wins all the Emmys but The Colbert Report is by far the faster, smarter, wittier show. Only a real dunderhead would take umbrage at Colbert’s tirades against Canada and all things Canadian. He’s supposed to sound nuts — that’s his “bit,” as he would say. After all, this is a man who noted of Thanksgiving: “Thanksgiving is just a prelude to the holiest day of the year — Black Friday.” And here was Colbert, for example, on the media’s obsession with the ludicrously overblown Gen. David Petraeus sex scandal: “I may be a news junkie, but I also gots (sic) to have my stories. And this is both. It’s like a steamy episode of Generals’ Hospital. The sex scandal is all anyone in Washington can talk about. I wonder why the country is in financial ruin?”

Later, in the same segment, Colbert complained the story was getting to be a little too far-fetched for his liking. “It’s not believable anymore. The news has jumped the shark.” But not, thankfully, Colbert himself.

4. Modern Family (ABC, Citytv) It’s almost impossible to describe in boring, simple printed words what a nifty high-wire act Modern Family manages to pull off, week after week. I don’t hold comedy in as high regard as drama as a rule, but Modern Family is the exception. It’s a wild, heady combination of love, life, longing, heartbreak and pride of family and place. A typical episode runs just 22 minutes. Minute by minute, second by second, there may be no finer written, directed or acted scripted series on television. The exchanges are fast and witty and cutting (“Haley going to college is a miracle; Lily going to kindergarten is the law”), but never cruel or mean-spirited (“Mr. Tucker, what happened out there today was unacceptable” / ”I agree. Is this kindergarten or The Hunger Games?”) And then there was this, from a father’s book of advice, lovingly passed on to his college-bound daughter: “Watch a sunrise at least once a day,” and, “The most amazing things that can happen to a human being will happen to you — if you remember to lower your expectations.” Having Modern Family in our lives right now is a true joy.

3. Homeland (Showtime, Super Channel) If the true sign of pop-cultural arrival in the post-ironic age of Twitter and the iPad is a parody on Saturday Night Live, then Homeland crossed the rubicon mere weeks ago with a wild send-up in an SNL hosted by Anne Hathaway. Then there was Stephen Colbert’s “Breaking News alert!” on The Colbert Report: “There’s another scandal at the CIA. Why can’t Claire Danes get her (act) together?”

Homeland is reputedly U.S. President Barack Obama’s favourite drama — and possibly the only TV drama he finds time to watch — as confirmed to Postmedia News this past summer by Homeland co-star and subsequent best-actor Emmy winner Damian Lewis.

Homeland became a little twisty toward the end of its second season, but it’s still a dazzling example of how a simple story — is he or is he not a terrorist? — told well can become an obsession, and one of the culture’s most hypnotically addictive thrillers. Claire Danes does have her act together, by the way. Literally.

2. Mad Men (AMC) Megan Calvet, that little number with Zou Bisou Bisou, Don Draper’s finding — and now possibly squandering — a semblance of happiness, Sally Draper’s sudden brush with puberty and adolescence: Mad Men had a heady, wonderful fifth season. And then, just when it seemed as if the entire season would turn out to be a flight of fancy — a mere dream of peace and contentment — Lane Pryce went and hanged himself in his corner office.

Mad Men has always been best when it sweeps the rug out from underneath the viewer emotionally and unexpectedly. This past season especially, Montreal ingenue Jessica Pare emerged as a star-in-the-making, as the seemingly too-good-to-be-true woman of Don Draper’s dreams, and the sense now is that there will never again be days like it in the Draper marriage. The same could be said of Mad Men: This was a top-drawer season in an already top-shelf drama series.

1. Breaking Bad (AMC) But then there was Breaking Bad, an always consistent, slow-burning thriller about a keen-minded but morally obtuse middle-class dad and high-school chemistry teacher who turned to cooking meth to help pay the medical bills and found he liked the business a little too much. Breaking Bad returns with its final run of eight episodes in the new year — probably in July — but the die is cast. There is no turning back for Bryan Cranston’s Walt White, not after what he did this past season. It’s possible that Aaron Paul’s Jesse Pinkman, Walt’s previously drug-addled but now sober assistant, will emerge as Breaking Bad’s one true good man. Then again, if you’ve been watching from the beginning, you know Pinkman has a lot to answer for, too. That’s Breaking Bad’s secret ingredient: With just eight episodes to go, it’s virtually impossible to figure out how this one’s going to end. And that, more than anything, is the sign of truly meaningful television that will stand the test of time.

National TV columnist for Postmedia News Network.
Two solitudes:
“My dream is to have a bank of TVs where all the different channels are on at the same time and I can be monitoring them,” the social... read more critic Camille Paglia told Wired magazine, back in the day, before Big Brother and before Survivor. “I love the tabloid stuff. The trashier the program is, the more I feel it’s TV.”
And then there’s this, from Gilligan’s Island creator Sherwood Schwartz: “There’s a lot of underlying philosophy to the characters on Gilligan’s Island. They’re really a metaphor for the nations of the world, and their purpose was to show how nations have to get along together . . . or cease to exist.”
There you have it, then. The trashier a program is, the more it’s like TV. Or, if you prefer, TV is a metaphor for the nations of the world, and Gilligan’s Island was really a message about why we don’t all get along.
That’s where I come in.
My first TV memory was of being menaced by a Dalek on Doctor Who — the original, scratchy, black-and-white Who.
My more recent TV memories include the Sopranos finale; 9/11; Elvis Costello’s first appearance (and temporary banishment) on Saturday Night Live; what was really inside the Erlenmeyer flask in The X-Files; Law & Order (the original, and those iconic chimes); glued to the set at 3am local time during the 2003 war in Iraq — TV’s first real-time war —and Bart Simpson scrawling on the chalkboard in The Simpsons’ opening credits: “I Must Not Write All Over the Walls.”
Other Bart-isms, as seen on that TV chalkboard over the years: “I Will Never Win an Emmy,” “I No Longer Want My MTV,” and, pointedly — if a little hopefully — “Network TV is Not Dead.”
I was there to witness "the new dawn of the sitcom" in the mid-1990s, followed — inevitably — by the glut of terrible sitcoms in the early naughts, a glut that led, directly and indirectly, to the rise of reality TV.
There’s been a lot to talk about — good, bad and indifferent — about TV over the years.
That’s where you, and this space, come in. Read on. Enjoy, feel free to agree, disagree and dispute whenever you want. TV may be ugly at times, but it's a mirror of democracy in action. A funhouse mirror at times, a sober reflection at others.View author's profile